osu!weekly #72

After wading through the tropical Asian humidity and taking a hike in residential Tokyo, I have arrived without incident at osu! Headquarters. For this issue of the osu!weekly, we'll be taking a look at things happening around the community right from the place that makes this game happen. Curious about which angle I took a picture of flyte from? Read on!

A big thanks to the following contributors for their help in this issue: Xylo-, Raveille, oopsjpeg, My_acc-X_X, dadbeat

Score V2 will be taking center stage once again with the much anticipated osu!standard edition of the World Cup tournament just around the corner. While there's still plenty to be done and much to be improved, you can have your say in the new scoring system right now in the open discussion that smoogipooo has created for us on the forums. Let us know what you think before it's too late!

Not to be outdone by official tournaments, our community organizers are making quite a scene themselves! The osu! Histy Championships have successfully concluded the first half of the group stage without a single missed match (much to the relief of the organizers). Be sure to tune in next week for the rest of the group stage matches!

Despite my absence, flyte is still going strong with his updates over at his blog! He even did a full length Q&A session on twitter, so go check that out if you want to see some of your questions answered. Even if he hasn't been posting, I have proof that he has been working! I saw it myself! So please give the poor man some breathing room and let him work in peace. Design is a tough job, you know.

(Thanks Nanaya) Not credited: The interior decorator of the osu! office.

The osu!taiko mascot was in a dire need of some love and our talent in the community stepped up to the challenge! With over 60 entries handcrafted by the players themselves, this contest already has one of the most successful turnouts for any creative competition in osu! history. Voting still goes on until the 5th of September, so head on over and cast your votes!

The osu!wiki is packing its bags and getting ready to move into a new home on github! The community knowledge base we know and love didn't bring everything along to it's new home though, as with the move we'll be completely dropping mediawiki in favor of markdown. I don't know about you, but I am breathing a sigh of relief as we get rid of that old and outdated standard. It does mean you will require a degree of understanding of how git works to contribute from now on, but I am certain it will prove a lower bar of entry than what it was before!

The new and improved osu!tablet has hit and left and hit the shelves again! The osu!tablet 2016 is a new take on the good old osu!tablet we know and love, now with updated firmware and improved pens! Also given a makeover is the design, which is now in a sleek black coat that really puts the "edge" in cutting-edge. Buy it now before it flies off the shelves yet again!

It looks like there's more fresh meat for the grinder after the conclusion of BN selection! After a grueling trial of modding knowledge, the dust has finally settled and we are left with 18 new beatmap nominators. Did you make it? You can check a full list of people who survived the ordeal in the staff promotion logs!

The volume of interesting and creative content our community sets out to create never ceases to impress the members of our osu!weekly discord channel! This week, we discovered that Rufus made a neat program that imposes the top 50 replays of maps on one playfield. One of the cool things that you can see is just how the map design encourages cursor dancing in varying degrees, and I think after you see the video you would agree that it's really eye catching!

Our little game has recently surpassed two numerical milestones! More than likely, you have already noticed that we have just surpassed 5 billion ranked plays, and that there are now over 500000 submitted maps in existence. It feels like just yesterday when we were still counting maps by the tens of thousands, and soon even hundreds of thousands wouldn't be enough to satisfy our ever growing player base!

It looks like we'll have to wait for another public dev meeting! Despite the success of the first open conference between staff and the larger development community, the ultimate conclusion was that we are going to alternate between open and closed door meetings to ensure a balance of internal productivity and transparency. Worry not, though, as we have our new meeting notes fresh off the oven rack ready for you to be consumed and digested in a timely manner! Check out the official development blog for more details.

Thanks for sticking with us despite how long this issue took! I promise that by next week our releases will return to our normal schedule. That said, we'll have a full recap of the mwc up to this point next week. Please drop by the dev discord using our fancy new invite link and let me know if there's any news you would like to see next week. If there's anything wrong in this issue, let me know in the comments and I'll try to fix it as soon as possible.

—Nyquill